POPE’S REVISION OF SPENCE’S ESSAY ON THE ODYSSEY.

Spence’s almost idolatrous admiration of, and devotion to, Pope, is evident from the pains he took to preserve every little anecdote of him that he could elicit from conversation with him, or with those who knew him.  Unfortunately, he had not Boswell’s address and talent for recording gossip, or the Anecdotes would have been a much more racy book.  Spence was certainly an amiable, but I think a very weak man; and it appears to me that his learning has been overrated.  He might indeed have been well designated as “a fiddle-faddle bit of sterling.”

I have the original MS. of the two last Dialogues of the Essay on the Odyssey as written by Spence, and on the first page is the following note:—­“The two last Evenings corrected by Mr. Pope.”  On a blank page at the end, Spence has again written:—­“MS. of the two last Evenings corrected with Mr. Pope’s own hand, w’ch serv’d y’e Press, and is so mark’d as usual by Litchfield.”

This will elucidate Malone’s note in his copy of the book, which Mr. Bolton Corney has transcribed.  I think the first three dialogues were published in a little volume before Spence became acquainted with Pope, and perhaps led to that acquaintance.  Their intercourse afterwards might supply some capital illustrations for a new edition of Mr. Corney’s curious chapter on Camaraderie Litteraire.  The MS. copy of Spence’s Essay bears frequent marks of Pope’s correcting hand by erasure and interlineary correction, silently made.  I transcribe the few passages where the poet’s revision of his critic are accompanied by remarks.

In Evening the Fourth, Spence had written:—­“It may be inquired, too, how far this translation may make a wrong use of terms borrowed from the arts and sciences, &c. [The instances are thus pointed out.] As where we read of a ship’s crew, Od. 3. 548.  The longitude, Od. 19. 350.  Doubling the Cape, Od. 9. 90.  Of Architraves, Colonnades, and the like, Od. 3. 516.”  Pope has erased this and the references, and says:—­“These are great faults; pray don’t point ’em out, but spare your servant.”

At p. 16.  Spence had written:—­“Yellow is a proper epithet of fruit; but not of fruit that we say at the same time is ripening into gold.”  Upon which Pope observes:—­“I think yellow may be s’d to ripen into gold, as gold is a deeper, fuller colour than yellow.”  Again:  “What is proper in one language, may not be so in another.  Were Homer to call the sea a thousand times by the title of [Greek:  porphureos], ‘purple deeps’ would not sound well in English.  The reason’s evident:  the word ‘purple’ among us is confined to one colour, and that not very applicable to the deep.  Was any one to translate the purpureis oloribus of Horace, ’purple swans’ would not be so literal as to miss the sense of the author entirely.”  Upon which Pope has remarked:—­“The sea is actually of a deep purple in many places, and in many views.”